International Fundraising Groups Aim to Collaborate in Use of Mobile Campaigns to Combat Maternal and Newborn Mortality

The mHealth Alliance, which comprises several nonprofit organizations seeking to improve health in underserved communities through sustainable mobile campaigns, has called for collaboration to accelerate the use of mobile and other modern information and communications technologies to improve maternal and newborn health in developing nations.

"Technological innovation is critical to meeting the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. This mHealth initiative can help deliver more health for the money in delivering safer pregnancies and newborns around the world," said Dr. Tore Godal, special advisor on global health to the prime minister of Norway and co-chairman of the Innovation Working Group of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Joint Action Plan for Maternal Health.

"More must be done to reduce global maternal and child mortality, and information technology, while not a panacea, will play a critical role in educating women and providers about how to deliver healthier pregnancies and healthier babies," said Dr. Flavia Bustreo, director of the World Health Organization's Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH).

The initial supporters include the mHealth Alliance — which is composed of the Rockefeller Foundation, United Nations Foundation, Vodafone Foundation and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — PMNCH, Family Care International, the GSM Association, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health, PATH, and the White Ribbon Alliance.

The Joint Action Plan calls for five primary action areas:

• Identify how technology can help enable known interventions that address maternal & newborn health needs.
• Design and build the first models of information and communications technologies (ICT) systems to do this, and the content and policies to go with them.
• Create new metrics for evaluating programs, using the enormous amount of data ICT-supported programs will produce.
• Test these integrated, end-to-end, scalable solutions in a variety of countries to learn what works best.
• Share activities in all four of the above, and lessons learned and best practices, with the global maternal health communities through a variety of communications channels.

View the full press release here.